The pledge comes at a very opportune moment. According to the Chronicle,

About one in four adults suffers from a mental disorder, and one in 17 people live with a serious mental illness like major depression, bipolar disorder, or schizophrenia, according to the National Institute on Mental Health. The World Health Organization estimates 450 million people worldwide suffer from such diseases.

One would think that such staggering statistics would lead state and national leaders to allocate more funds to addressing the needs of the mentally ill. Not so, says the Chronicle. Instead,

. . . from 2009 to 2011, states cut more than $1.8-billion from their budgets for services helping children and adults who have mental illnesses, states the National Alliance on Mental Illness. Support for scientific research has dwindled, and what remains is difficult to obtain because of increased competition for scarce dollars.

This is a sad situation. Like the Chronicle, I hope Mr. Stanley's gift will "spark a flurry of additional donations to mental-health causes."

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Comments

one in four sounds startling, and NIMH does not quite back that uphttp://www.nimh.nih.gov/statistics/1ANYDIS_ADULT.shtml
more like one in five, and of course includes anything that meets DSM-IV, which is basically a list of stuff for which you can prescribe pharmaceuticals and maybe get insurance reimbursement